CONTENT WARNING: Graphic language, descriptions of violence

Social media and traditional media alike are buzzing with discourse about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Most of the discourse I’ve seen seems to focus on Charlie Kirk’s character and hand-wringing about political violence. I see all the signs of classic online discourse - people present their hot take and then defend it against detractors.

I have seen very little conversation so far that goes deeper and considers, whatever your hot take is, what is the ethical framework you are using to reach that conclusion? What is the worldview that informs your belief? And how does your position serve some kind of strategy about building the world you would like to see? In other words, the bigger questions about ethics and strategy. I often find that conversations on social media fail to examine ethics and strategy. I think this is one of the reasons why social media discourse frequently fails us, leaving us with in-group jargon and sectarian talking points, but not much of a holistic understanding of our neighbors’ worldviews or strategies to solve problems.

I would like to see us collectively discuss: what are the ethical frameworks and worldviews that say the assassination of Charlie Kirk is justified? What are the ethical frameworks and worldviews that say his killing is not justified? I would also like to see us discuss: What is politically strategic about the assassination of Charlie Kirk? And what are the strategic pitfalls of the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

I ask these questions not as some sort of intellectual “gotcha.” I don’t have the “right answer” either. This is not me pushing up my glasses and going “well, actually…” I ask these questions because I think they are unfortunately very relevant to our current trajectory as a society. I think we are headed into times where more deadly violence is going to happen. I think we will continue to be in the position of responding to violent attacks and, potentially, weighing whether to participate in violence. I think these are questions that people who are in community with each other should discuss. Whoever’s fate is intertwined with yours when the proverbial s**t hits the fan…we should talk about this stuff. Now. We should start working through some of the differences we have about these issues. I care about ethics and strategy because I think it’s going to matter.

In this essay I’d like to offer some potential answers to my own questions, not necessarily as an exposé about my own beliefs, but as examples of what a deeper discussion could yield.

Off the top of my head, here are some ethical frameworks or worldviews that might justify the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

Let’s start with the “violence against fascists is justified” argument. This is the idea that you cannot defeat fascists with persuasion. Whether the violence is in the future or now, it really only is violence or the adequate threat of violence that reigns them in, so the argument goes.

There is the argument that fascism is distinct from most other “political differences” or “differences of opinion.” A comedian and influencer named Mohawk Johnson recently posted a video on Instagram articulating this exact point. Mohawk Johnson states:

“Instead of saying ‘Charlie Kirk had ideologies or beliefs that I don’t agree with but that doesn’t mean he deserves to die,’ I want you to say what the beliefs are…Don’t be vague…I want you to hear yourselves. And if you still feel that way, fine. But instead of saying Charlie Kirk had different beliefs, say, ‘Charlie Kirk believed that gay people deserve to be stoned to death, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.’ Say that. Type it in the comment section. Type, ‘Charlie Kirk believed that the Civil Rights movement was a mistake, but that doesn’t mean he deserved to die.’ Say, ‘Charlie Kirk said that women aren’t good for anything but breeding and they don’t deserve human rights, but I don’t believe he deserved to die.’ Say the stuff he said. Say, ‘Charlie Kirk believed that it was okay that children died from gun violence, because as long as we got to have the Second Amendment that was the price we have to pay, but I don’t believe he deserved to die.’ Say, ‘Charlie Kirk called for public executions…and said that we should bring children to those executions, but I don’t believe he deserved to die…Say the s**t he said, and if you still believe it, fine. But say what the f**k he believed instead of hiding behind the word ‘belief.’”

I don’t know how Mohawk Johnson would describe his own worldview. But there is a worldview which argues that the battle with fascism is not really a “sectarian” conflict, it’s not a conflict between social groups that somehow need to find a way to co-exist in the end. It sees fascism as an existential threat. Now and always. This worldview argues that we need to get over any squeamishness about killing fascists and recognize that it is a justifiable form of violence. This ethical framework says: If you’re okay with “historical” versions of fighting fascism, you need to understand you are living through history right now. Another rise of fascism is here and now.

Then there is the “oppressed groups will strike back” argument. This line of thinking goes that if you publicly call for certain groups of people to be harmed or killed, then it should be no surprise if someone is violent towards you as an act of preservation and protection. Threatened people defend themselves. Oppressed people eventually lash out. There’s only so far you can push people until they push back. This is nothing new and no cause for pearl-clutching, so the argument goes.

Then there is the argument that “people in positions of power are fair game for political violence.” This ethical framework asserts that “ordinary people” or “civilians” should not be targeted for killing, no matter how abhorrent their personal worldviews are, but people in power are acceptable targets. It’s why someone might believe it is fair game to kill Charlie Kirk but not the college students who came to listen to him. It is the ethical bedrock beneath the idea that even oppressed people have the moral responsibility of picking the right targets for their resistance. Slave owners, imperial officers, politicians, cops, corporate executives, soldiers, prison guards, domestic abusers, militias…these people wield direct power over life and death and therefore their life and death is fair game. This argument does not justify assassination for “thought crimes” but rather for “power crimes.” It’s not so much that a target deserves death for their personal beliefs but rather because of their positions of power. This worldview acknowledges the reality that plenty of oppressed people also hold views that are misogynistic, homophobic, or prejudiced towards another ethnic, religious, or racial group. This worldview holds the ethical line that you don’t kill people for being wrong, you kill them for being powerful and dangerous.

And to that point, propagandists are sometimes considered powerful and dangerous, and have been punished for their use of that power, even if their influence over life and death is more indirect. One prominent example is the radio DJs who were successfully prosecuted for their role in the Rwandan genocide. Charlie Kirk could certainly be viewed as something of a radio DJ for white Christian nationalism.

Off the top of my head, here are some ways that one might view the assassination of Charlie Kirk as strategic:

Some people might believe that it is time to give a warning to fascists, to let them know it is possible to kill them.

Others might believe in the strategy of using assassinations to inspire insurrection. This strategy is less about proving a point to the enemy and more so about proving a point to the populace - “You can fight back.” The strategy has historical precedent. Assassinations of imperial officials helped spur decolonization in many countries. Assassinations of British officers in India come to mind in particular.

But this is also the logic behind the “accelerationist” perspective on the far right. This might be a good moment to mention that the exact political orientation of Charlie Kirk’s assassin is still unclear. Early media reports labelled him as left-wing “antifa” based on what was found written on his bullet casings, but other people have asserted that the bullet casings were references to alt-right memes and that he might be a “groyper.” For those who are unfamiliar, “groypers” are a faction of the far right led by influencers like Nick Fuentes, who believe in “accelerating” a race war, and who frequently viewed Charlie Kirk as being too mainstream. We don’t know the killer’s true motives at this point in time, but we can still safely state that multiple political perspectives may view assassinations as a strategy to foment insurrection.

Off the top of my head, here are some ethical frameworks and worldviews that might say the assassination of Charlie Kirk is not justified:

One such perspective is that “many people deserve to die but we do not deserve to become their executioners.” This is a point of view that I see articulated by death penalty abolitionists in particular. These activists often acknowledge that there will always be crimes so heinous that death feels fair - but do we deserve to become their executioners? As individuals and as a society, do we deserve to take on that moral injury to our own humanity?

Earlier this year I had the unique experience of talking down a teenage boy who intended to kidnap and kill the man who raped his mother. Our conversation focused on exactly this point - maybe the man did deserve to die, but the boy did not deserve to become a killer. Thankfully, the boy changed his mind and decided to seek justice and support his mother in other ways.

Recently, I was struck by the case of Brian Dorsey, a man who was executed in Missouri in April of 2024. Dorsey had killed two people in a drug-fueled rage in 2006. He was not innocent. But a diverse array of people, including people who are not ordinarily death penalty abolitionists, advocated for his life to be spared. Apparently he had undergone a transformation in jail to such an extent that prison staff viewed killing him as “pointless cruelty.” The pleas from the prison staff to halt his execution were exactly this argument - “Don’t make us become killers.”

This argument also points to the example of Shalom Nagar, a man who was the final prison guard and eventual executioner of Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary Nazi architects of the Holocaust. Eichmann did not experience any transformation while imprisoned in Israel and remained unrepentant to the end. But Nagar was still profoundly traumatized by the experience of being his jailer and killer. His bond with Eichmann was bizarrely intimate - Nagar was tasked with eating the first few bites of Eichmann’s food at every meal to make sure Eichmann was not being poisoned. The two spent 24-hour shifts together in incredibly close quarters, usually mere feet away from each other. Nagar, at the age of 26, begged to be spared from the task of executing Eichmann, telling Israeli authorities that he was not capable of hanging anyone, even an unrepentant Nazi. But his superiors made their orders clear, and he was chosen to complete the task. Eichmann refused a blindfold and looked Nagar in the eyes as he pulled the trapdoor. Nagar was then tasked with taking down Eichmann’s body, wrapping it in sheets, and pushing it on a stretcher into an oven for cremation. Taking down the body involved lifting Eichmann’s head which drove trapped air out of the body in a booming cry. Nagar broke down, shaking all over, and was unable to put Eichmann’s body in the oven. The experience gave him nightmares and terrors for years.

Not everyone who kills another human being is an executioner. Some people are just survivors. Take the case of Joan Little, a Black woman from North Carolina who killed a white prison guard while he was threatening her with an ice pick and sexually assaulting her. Joan Little stood trial for murder in 1975 but was acquitted. Joan Little survived her attack by taking a life, but I suspect the psychological experience was very different from that of a pre-meditated execution. Not all killing creates the same type of moral injury.

Even some types of pre-meditated murder do not appear to damage people’s humanity. I think of the teenage girl Nazi assassins during WWII as a prime example. Throughout Europe there were these assassin cells made up of teenage girls that were instrumental in resistance to Nazi occupations, using their easy access to Nazi officials to conduct covert assassinations. When I was in Serbia in 2019, I had the honor of meeting a woman who had been part of one of these teenage girl assassin cells during WWII. Her granddaughter was in the process of interviewing the few teenage girl Nazi assassins who were still alive. These interviews painted a picture that, while the whole of WWII was traumatic, obviously, the act of killing Nazis did not appear to cause the same kind of “moral injury” to these girls as the execution of Eichmann later caused to Shalom Nagar.

If I had to guess, I would guess that, even though war involves pre-meditated murder of your opponents, people who face invaders often have moral clarity about the war they are fighting: “these are the enemy combatants, they are armed and dangerous, we have no choice but to fight in order to defend our lives and homes,” etc. etc. etc. War is hell no matter what, but sometimes you don’t have a choice - hell simply arrives on your doorstep. It appears to be a different experience for us humans when we willfully kill a person who is an active threat, compared to when we willfully kill a person who has been neutralized, who stands before us no longer armed and dangerous but instead bound in chains. Things change when a soldier from the battlefield becomes a prisoner of war.

Or, as the case may be, perhaps we experience moral injury when we willfully kill a person whose rhetoric calls for violence against others but has never wielded a weapon other than words, a person who is the PR for violence rather than the violence itself. In this worldview, maybe Charlie Kirk did deserve death, but we do not deserve to become his executioners. Maybe the Tucker Carlsons, Glenn Becks, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaughs, and Joe Rogans of the world don’t deserve life, but we do not deserve to carry the burden of their deaths.

Another perspective says, yes, some people in positions of power might be fair game for death. But deciding at what proximity to power the penalty of death kicks in is actually extremely difficult, and people who pretend it is simple are fooling themselves. One need only look to revolutions in Cuba, China, Russia, France, and Cambodia to see that many people have grappled with this question: how close did you have to be to power to be purged? No one ideology has asked this question either, this has been a reality faced by all different flavors of regimes and rebellions. Syria seems to be in the middle of asking itself these questions right now with the recent toppling of the Assad regime and the installation of former militants as the ruling party. Truth and reconciliation efforts after wars and genocides have also dealt with these questions - just think of the lengthy reckonings that happened in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Colombia, for example. When a war or genocide sweeps up an entire society, who gets punished and how? Do beliefs and rhetoric count? Or does only the body count count? Which words and which actions are considered crimes? Who is a civilian and who is a combatant?

This is a worldview that is able to distinguish between different types of political violence. It is a worldview that can speak to the incredibly human reasons why those teenage girls in WWII had a different experience killing Nazis than Shalom Nagar had in an Israeli prison some decades later. Or why Joan Little was no executioner for killing her rapist, but the teenage boy I spoke to would have become one had he killed his mother’s rapist.

This ethical framework or worldview might urge caution - do not believe it is easy to draw the line about who deserves death and who deserves life. Do not hasten putting yourself in that position. Be careful what you wish for. Urge caution when it comes to meting out death. Outside of direct self-defense and “just” war, those decisions can cause tremendous moral injury and trauma, and potentially damage collective humanity when permitted on a large enough scale.

Off the top of my head, these are some of the potential strategic pitfalls of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

One argument might be that killing people as a way to try and kill ideas rarely works. This argument might point out that killing the propagandist accomplishes very little unless you topple the “regime” that the propaganda is serving. You cannot kill ideas, you can only defeat oppressors until they no longer have any power to oppress. Sometimes this involves violence, like civil war or revolution. But it doesn’t always take violence to make certain regimes, political parties, or extremist movements crumble. There’s no one way to achieve this tactical defeat, this rendering of a political movement as ineffectual or obsolete. You can’t actually get rid of what they think you can just make sure they don’t have any ability to do, so the argument goes.

But in this line of thinking, a person like Charlie Kirk did not have the right type of power for his targeting to be strategic. The power of white Christian nationalism, the ability of that belief system to build an even stronger apparatus of power, has not been altered by Kirk’s death, one might argue. One might argue that killing Charlie Kirk has not hurt their infrastructure of power at all and that their ability to do has not been undercut.

This line of thinking also ties into the idea that media personalities and activists who are killed often turn into martyrs. They are often the public face of an ideology, the object for people’s emotional attachment and investment in the cause. Their deaths often play out differently than people in other positions of power, like, perhaps, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, who almost no one has turned into a martyr.

Some also may question the strategy of trying to hasten an insurrection in the U.S., pointing towards arguments that the general population is not organized enough yet for that to make sense. Or who may want to exhaust other strategies before opening the gates to the hell that is war. Those who open those gates can’t always control what comes through.

Time to log off

Okay, time to put down the phone and go talk to people. I asked the questions I wanted to ask. My own off-the-dome answers to those questions are by no means exhaustive. I hope you can think of plenty more. I also hope that reading this essay has felt different for your heart and body than consuming social media content about this exact same topic. I hope this space was one where you could think and feel freely and where listening was not threatening. My hope is that, no matter where your train of thought is at, you will take it offline and talk with the people who are shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Ethics and strategy matter. Talk about this stuff now. This is not the last we will see of it.

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Episode image is undated photo of women Yugoslav Partisans, WWII

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